squarespace versus <insert shiny framework here>

This is the first post of what will eventually be a collection of interesting tech finds, how-tos, and other sorts of rants deemed relevant to the wild world of tech. This first post also coincides with what could be considered the "release" of Autodeus Engineering's website which is very exciting! An intentful decision was made to use Squarespace over building everything from scratch which proved to be the correct tool for the job.

Autodeus Engineering always strives to be product-minded. Building a website for ourselves became an odd situation, we were the consultant and the customer ... so we sat Autodeus down with a couple cups of coffee one day and asked, "Autodeus, what do you need out of your website to get going?" After a bit of thought, Autodeus replied, "Well, we've already finished a couple contracts, have a couple on-going, and we need to keep the momentum. Long story short, having a pretty website would be a great asset to start marketing ourselves, a means of letting people know what we're all about. Oh yeah! It definitely needs some cool pictures and a blog too.” … With requirements understood, we got to work with the end goal in mind.

As a passionate developers, it's tempting to try and build everything from scratch with the latest fandangled framework. We work with a handful of talented frontend developers that could've been tapped into for some concise ninja work. Believe us, we would've loved to build everything from scratch with a small team by creating a task board, setting up the boilerplate for Vue in Typescript by firing up NPM, installing a bunch of packages, typing straight HTML into terminals with Vim, futzing around with CSS, automating deployments with Terraform, and then burning through the the rest of the tasks. Let's be real though, all of that would've been absolute overkill. No need to swat a fly with a bazooka.

We’d already started working with a graphic designer on creation of a logo and some color scheme/font ideas for the website when they suggested we could work together and create a site with Squarespace. There are so many wonderful tools available in modern times that identifying the correct one and which layers of abstraction to work at are often the most challenging part of any project. Being fortunate enough to have a talented network of individuals a phone call away helped with that immensely, as the suggestion of using Squarespace was a great idea. It was the shortest path from zero website to meeting the requirements within business constraints in a timely manner.

… and here we are now, another project complete, another happy customer, happy Autodeus :)